Few terms have become as unmoored
from their Catholic origins, and have thus lent themselves to misunderstanding
in contemporary discourse, as has the term “social justice.” What does the term
mean when it appears in papal documentsparticularly when it appeared in the
formative years of Catholic social teaching?

It is an important question, because
all of the Christian faithful, according to the Code of Canon Law, are “obliged
to promote social justice and, mindful of the precept of the Lord, to assist
the poor from their own resources” (Code of Canon Law 222 §2; Code of Canons of
the Eastern Churches 25 §2). Pastors of parishes are obliged “to foster works
through which the spirit of the Gospel is promoted, even in what pertains to
social justice” (Code of Canon Law 528 §1). It is also “desirable that the Catholic
faithful undertake any project in which they could cooperate with other
Christians, not alone but together, such as works for charity and social
justice” (Code of Canons of the Eastern Churches 908).

In his Church,
State, and Society: An Introduction to Catholic Social Doctrine (Catholic
University of America Press, 2011),J. Brian
Benestad of the University of Scranton notes that “a Jesuit philosopher by the
name of Luigi Taparelli D’Azeglio was the first to use the concept of social
justice in his major work, Saggio teoretico di
diritto.” Father Taparelli (1793-1862) served as rector of the Roman
College and helped found La CiviltÀ Cattolica, the
Italian Jesuit periodical.

“For Taparelli, social justice is not
a metaphor, nor the extension of virtue language to anthropomorphized
collectives,” Thomas C. Behr of the University of Houston said in a paper delivered in 2003
at the annual conference of the Pontifical Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas. According
to Behr, Taparelli held that social justice is distinct from both commutative
justice (defined
by the late Father John Hardon as “the virtue that regulates those actions
which involve the rights between one individual and another individual”) and
distributive justice (defined
as “the virtue that regulates those actions which involve the rights that
an individual may claim from society”).

Behr wrote that the definition of
social justice

can
be stated succinctly thus: a legal order and normative ideal within a society
by which individuals and their various associations are given the maximum range
of liberty in pursuit of their proper ends, with a minimum of interference from
superior authorities, i.e., only to the extent necessary to orient general
activity towards the common good, and governed by the principles of conflicting
rights, prudence, and, ultimately, of charity. This is not the only way that
Taparelli uses the term, but it is arguably the most important of his uses.

Perhaps the earliest appearance of
“social justice” in a curial document was in 1894, when the Sacred Congregation
of the Council, ruling on a canonical question, stated that “a new practice of
social justice was born from that principle ‘the despoiled before all things
ought to be restored’” (Acta Sanctae Sedis,
1894-95, p. 131). The term appeared again in the 1904 encyclical Iucunda
Sane, when Pope Pius X wrote that Pope St. Gregory the Great acted
as a “public defender of social justice” [publicus iustitiae socialis adsertor] during his years as a legate in
Byzantium.

Pius XI: The pope of
social justice

The term “social justice” came to the
fore during the pontificate of Pius XI (1922-39). In Studiorum Ducem,
his 1923 encyclical on St. Thomas Aquinas, Pope Pius wrote that “Thomas refutes
the theories propounded by Modernists in every sphere…in sociology and law, by
laying down sound principles of legal and social, commutative and distributive,
justice and explaining the relations between justice and charity.”

Asked what Pope Pius meant when he
spoke of St. Thomas’ “sound principles of social justice,” Dr. Anthony Andres,
a faculty member at Thomas Aquinas College, said, “I think that the principles
which Pius XI is referring to are specifically those which are denied by the
most prominent modern political philosophers, from Hobbes and Locke to Hegel
and Marx.”

“The first is that the common good of
the political community is more desirable for each individual than his own
private good,” Andres told CWR. “This splits the difference between two false
views, one in which the common good is understood to be merely a means for the
individual attaining his private good, or another in which the common good is
seen as opposed to the good of the individual. St. Thomas thinks that the
common good is not opposed to the good of the individual, but instead is the
most fulfilling good that he can participate in.”

“The second is that the temporal
common good of the political community should be ordered to a higher common
good, the eternal salvation offered by God to men through Christ and his Church,”
Andres added. “Modern political philosophers either subordinate religion and
the Church to the political authority, or take atheism as a first principle in
politics.”

Pope Pius referred repeatedly to social
justice in Quadragesimo
Anno, his 1931 encyclical on the reconstruction of the social
order. Linking the “law of social justice” to the common good, he stated that

not
every distribution among human beings of property and wealth is of a character
to attain either completely or to a satisfactory degree of perfection the end
which God intends. Therefore, the riches that economic-social developments
constantly increase ought to be so distributed among individual persons and
classes that the common advantage of all, which Leo XIII had praised, will be
safeguarded; in other words, that the common good of all society will be kept
inviolate.

By
this law of social justice, one class is forbidden to exclude the other from
sharing in the benefits. Hence the class of the wealthy violates this law no
less, when, as if free from care on account of its wealth, it thinks it the
right order of things for it to get everything and the worker nothing, than
does the non-owning working class when, angered deeply at outraged justice and
too ready to assert wrongly the one right it is conscious of, it demands for
itself everything as if produced by its own hands, and attacks and seeks to
abolish, therefore, all property and returns or incomes, of whatever kind they
are or whatever the function they perform in human society, that have not been
obtained by labor, and for no other reason save that they are of such a nature.
(no. 57).

“To each, therefore, must be given
his own share of goods, and the distribution of created goods, which, as every
discerning person knows, is laboring today under the gravest evils due to the
huge disparity between the few exceedingly rich and the unnumbered
propertyless, must be effectively called back to and brought into conformity
with the norms of the common good, that is, social justice,” Pope Pius
continued (no. 58).

Later in the encyclical, Pope Pius
applied this norm of social justice to the question of wages:

Every
effort must therefore be made that fathers of families receive a wage large
enough to meet ordinary family needs adequately. But if this cannot always be
done under existing circumstances, social justice demands that changes be
introduced as soon as possible whereby such a wage will be assured to every
adult workingman. (no. 71)

It
is contrary to social justice when, for the sake of personal gain and without
regard for the common good, wages and salaries are excessively lowered or
raised; and this same social justice demands that wages and salaries be so
managed, through agreement of plans and wills, in so far as can be done, as to
offer to the greatest possible number the opportunity of getting work and
obtaining suitable means of livelihood. (no. 74)

Considering the larger question of
the ordering of society, Pope Pius believed that while “free competition” (liberum certamen) and political power over the economy (oeconomicus potentatus) justly hold a limited place, neither
is able on its own to direct society towards the common good. Both need social
justice as a “directive principle”:

It
is most necessary that economic life be again subjected to and governed by a
true and effective directing principle. This function is one that the economic
dictatorship [potentantus, perhaps better
rendered “power”] which has recently displaced free competition can still less
perform, since it is a headstrong power and a violent energy that, to benefit
people, needs to be strongly curbed and wisely ruled. But it cannot curb and
rule itself. Loftier and nobler principlessocial justice and social charitymust,
therefore, be sought whereby this dictatorship [potentatus]
may be governed firmly and fully. Hence, the institutions themselves of peoples
and, particularly those of all social life, ought to be penetrated with this
justice, and it is most necessary that it be truly effective, that is,
establish a juridical and social order which will, as it were, give form and
shape to all economic life. Social charity, moreover, ought to be as the soul
of this order. (no. 88)

A capitalist economic system, Pius
explained, “is not of its own nature vicious. But it does violate right order
when capital hires workers, that is, the non-owning working class, with a view
to and under such terms that it directs business and even the whole economic
system according to its own will and advantage, scorning the human dignity of
the workers, the social character of economic activity and social justice
itself, and the common good” (no. 101).

“So as to avoid the reefs of
individualism and collectivism, the twofold character, that is individual and
social, both of capital or ownership and of work or labor must be given due and
rightful weight,” Pope Pius said as he continued his reflections on social
justice. “The public institutions themselves, of peoples, moreover, ought to
make all human society conform to the needs of the common good, that is, to the
norm of social justice. If this is done, that most important division of social
life, namely, economic activity, cannot fail likewise to return to right and
sound order” (no. 110).

In his final mention of “social
justice” in the encyclical, Pope Pius speaks of the “ranks of those who,
zealously following the admonitions which Leo [XIII] promulgated [in his 1893
encyclical Rerum Novarum] and We have solemnly
repeated, are striving to restore society according to the mind of the Church
on the firmly established basis of social justice and social charity” (no.
126).

Pope Pius XI returned to the theme of
social justice in two later encyclicals: Divini Redemptoris, his
1937 encyclical on atheistic Communism, and Firmissimam Constantiam, issued
nine days later, on the religious situation in Mexico.

In Divini
Redemptoris, Pope Pius recalled the teaching of Quadragesimo
Anno: “We have shown that the means of saving the world of today
from the lamentable ruin into which a moral liberalism has plunged us, are
neither the class-struggle nor terror, nor yet the autocratic abuse of state
power, but rather the infusion of social justice and the sentiment of Christian
love into the social-economic order” (no. 32), to quote the loose but generally
accurate English translation of the paragraph on
the Vatican website. (Readers of Latin can find the official version of the
encyclical in volume 29 of Acta
Apostolicae Sedis.)

In a subsequent paragraph (no. 51),
however, the English translation errs in conveying Pope Pius’ description of
the essence of social justice, as Thomas Storck pointed out in a
recent article in Homiletic and Pastoral
Review. The Latin text literally says, “But in fact, besides the
justice that they call commutative, social justice, which indeed demands its
own duties, ought to be cultivated, from which duties neither artificers nor
owners are able to remove themselves. And indeed it is [the essence] of social
justice to demand from individuals everything that is necessary for the common
good.”

“If social justice be satisfied, the
result will be an intense activity in economic life as a whole, pursued in
tranquility and order,” the Vatican website’s English translation continues. “But
social justice cannot be said to have been satisfied as long as workingmen are
denied a salary that will enable them to secure proper sustenance for
themselves and for their families; as long as they are denied the opportunity
of acquiring a modest fortune and forestalling the plague of universal
pauperism; as long as they cannot make suitable provision through public or
private insurance for old age, for periods of illness and unemployment” (no.
52).

In Firmissimam
Constantiam, Pope Pius discussed the relation of social justice and
the right to private property. “While saving the essence of the primary and
fundamental rights, such as the right of ownership, remember that at times the
common good imposes restrictions on such rights as a recourse more frequent
than in the past to the applications of social justice,” he wrote to the
bishops of Mexico. “You must assist [the laborer] materially and religiously.
Materially, bringing about in his favor the practice not only of commutative
justice but also of social justice, that is, all those provisions which aim at
relieving the condition of the proletarian; and then, religiously, giving him
again the religious comforts without which he will struggle in a materialism
that brutalizes him and degrades him” (no. 16).

Pope Pius XI’s multifaceted
reflections on social justice have led different writers and scholars of
undoubted fidelity to the Church’s teaching to define the term “social justice”
with slightly different nuances. Thomas Storck writes that social justice, although
“concerned with the duties of the individual to the common good, concerns not
individual actions, such as paying taxes, but the fostering and establishment
of organizations and institutions of society which contribute toward the common
good.” In Church, State, and Society, J. Brian
Benestad writes that “social justice is a virtue inclining persons and groups
to work for the common good of the family, the professions, voluntary associations,
schools, neighborhoods, and the political community on the local, national, or
international level.” In a paper
presented at the 2008 assembly of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, Russell
Hittinger of the University of Tulsa said that “for Pius XI, social justice is
that kind of order than ensues when each person is capacitated to ‘contribute
to the common good according to his proper office and role (function) … Social
justice is the virtue whereby all persons (not just the state) refer the
ensemble of their relations to the common good.”

Popes Pius XII and
John XXIII

Venerable Pius XII (1939-58) employed
the term “social justice” with less frequency than did his predecessor. In his
November 1939 encyclical, Sertum Laetitiae,
he used the term in quoting his predecessor’s teaching on the family wage. Addressing
Croatian pilgrims four days after the encyclical’s publication, Pius XII
referred to the Roman Church as the “infallible interpreter of eternal truth,
the powerful patron of social justice, the indefatigable support of concord
among nations.”

In
a 1944 allocution to Roman parish priests, Pius XII quoted again from his
predecessor’s teaching on social justice and said that the Church seeks to
“achieve an economic order that through its very structure creates for the
working class a secure and stable condition, all according to the maxims of
social justice expressed and exhibited by our predecessor.” Five years later,
in his letter to the German hierarchy Testes
obsequii, Pius XII wrote that social justice, “in ordering well
the division and use of resources, ought to watch over and bring about a most
beautiful alliance of wisdom and benevolence and uprightness.”

In
a 1952 letter, Pius XII exhorted members of Marian sodalities to excel “in
universal apostolic zeal directed especially to society, which ought to be
renewed according to principles of charity and social justice.”

“We strive to hasten the arrival of a
time when…liberty might be joined with social justice in a beautiful alliance,”
Pope Pius added in Hadriatici Maris urbs,
his 1956 letter on the fifth centenary of the death of St. Lawrence Giustiniani.

The term “social justice” appeared
again in the writings of Blessed John XXIII (1958-63), though inexact English
translations of his encyclicals have the potential to obscure his teaching. In
popular English translations of two of his encyclicals, the term “social
justice” appears in English where it does not appear in the Latin, and in one
place the term does not appear in the English where it does appear in the Latin
(Mater et Magistra, no. 73).

In his 1959 encyclical Mater et Magistra, Blessed John wrote (in a literal, if
stilted, translation from the Latin) that Pope Pius XI

enjoins
that, whether in public institutions or in freely established institutions, in
individual states as among nations, under the auspice of social justice, that
order of law ought to be established in which those who work in economic
matters might be able to join fittingly their own advantages to themselves with
common benefits to all. (no. 40)

Blessed John added that it is “a most
grave precept of social justice” that “increases of economic condition always
should be not only joined to, but at the same time applied to, increases of
social condition; so indeed, from an increased abundance of riches in a
republic, all orders of citizens certainly should obtain fair gains” (no. 73).

Later, in a
1960 radio address at the conclusion of a Eucharistic Congress in Bavaria,
Blessed John prayed that Christians might “offer to fellow citizens examples of
all virtues, in the first place social justice and charity.”

In contemporary political discourse,
discussions about social justice often revolve around particular government
programs. For the popes who guided the Church during the formative years of the
development of Catholic social doctrine, social justice is something far
richer, far more demanding: it is a virtue that, while not defined with
crystalline precision, challenges all participants in society to seek the
common good.

Ziegler writes from North Carolina.

About the Author

J. J. Ziegler

J. J. Ziegler writes from North Carolina.

All comments posted at Catholic World Report are moderated. While vigorous debate is welcome and encouraged, please note that in the interest of maintaining a civilized and helpful level of discussion, comments containing obscene language or personal attacks—or those that are deemed by the editors to be needlessly combative and inflammatory—will not be published. Thank you.